days later the police would find a button on which they
would build a story that would make him the criminal? Florentin had not
thought of all that."

"That is understood."

"The same evening he replaced the button by another, and it was only on
reading the newspaper that he felt there might be something serious in
this apparently insignificant fact. And we shared his alarm."

"Have you spoken to any one of this button?"

"Certainly not; we know too much. I tell you of it because I tell you
everything; and if we are menaced, we have no help to expect, except
from you. Florentin is a good boy, but he is weak and foolish. Mamma
is like him in more than one respect, and as for me, although I am more
resistant, I confess that, in the face of the law and the police, I
should easily lose my head, like children who begin to scream when they
are left in the dark. Is not the law, when you know nothing of it, a
night of trouble, full of horrors, and peopled with phantoms?"

"I do not believe there is the danger that you imagined in the first
moment of alarm."

"It was natural."

"Very natural, I admit, but reflection must show how little foundation
there is for it. The button has not the name of the tailor who furnished
it?"

"No, but it has the initials and the mark of the manufacturer; an A and
a P, with a crown and a cock."

"Well! Among two or three thousand tailors in Paris, how is it possible
for the police to find those who use these buttons? And when the tailors
are found, how could they designate the owner of this button, this one
exactly, and not another? It is looking for a needle in a bundle of hay.
Where did your brother have these trousers made? Did he bring them from
America?"

"The poor boy brought nothing from America but wretchedly shabby
clothes, and we had to clothe him from head to foot. We were obliged to
economize, and a little tailor in the Avenue de Clichy, called Valerius,
made this suit."

"It seems to me scarcely probable that the police will find this little
tailor. But if they do, would he recognize the button as coming from
his stock? And, if they get as far as your brother, they must prove that
there was a struggle; that the button was torn off in this struggle;
that your brother was in the Rue Sainte-Anne between five and six
o'clock; in which case, without doubt, he will find it easy to prove
where he was at that moment."

"He was with us--with mamma."

"You see, then, you need